My sister came home from England for Christmas this last year. Knowing this, and not yet (at that time) having a US release date for Xenoblade Chronicles, I decided to import something by means of her luggage. That’s right, millionaire shortbread, mmm… oh, and Xenoblade Chronicles too. Ironically, the day after she bought the game, the US version was announced. I decided then and there that I would simply have to get both. I could no longer hold off on playing the game after deciding I would play it in January (after the holiday madness), and the US release had far too profound a meaning to me to miss that either. As a result I have since sunk over 240 hours into one of the best games I have ever played. And I am still excited to pick up my North American copy, as well.

Atop two gods, the setting of Xenoblade Chronicles:

Xenoblade Chronicles is a game of epic scope, and is yet somehow surprising dense in content. What really separates it from other massive RPGs is how unique the world is. Instead of crossing continents upon the face of a boring old sphere, Xenoblade Chronicles has you traversing the standing bodies of two dead gods locked in the final blow of their combat. The god you call home is known as Bionis, while the god beyond the horizon is known as Mechonis. I have never been a fan of large open world RPGs such as the Elder Scroll series because the environments, while vast, tend to be exceedingly dull. However, in Xenoblade Chronicles I started my adventure upon the foot of Bionis, I traveled up a mountain and into a cave, exiting on the god’s kneecap where I could look out at the massive form of Mechonis in the distance, his sword swooping over my head where it was buried in the body of Bionis. When I tell people that the game takes place on the body of 2 giant gods, they usually ask how the gravity works. This is when I know they are severely underestimating just how large this game’s world is. When you stand in a flat field, you do not see the curvature of the earth, which is why our ancestors believed the world flat. Similarly, when playing Xenoblade Chronicles, you often forget just what exactly the world is. There are, however, two things that remind you of the game’s unique setting. First, the nature of the world lends itself to spectacular views. The ocean you explored is a layer of water energy floating between the wings on Bionis’ back. The massive field you traverse is the Bionis’ thigh. The flat mechanical battlefield, a sword wedged in the Bionis’ side held firmly by Mechonis. Second is the sense of angular verticality in the game. You are always hiking, everything is on a slope, and this allows some amazing plateaus to look down upon the expanse from.

I see a little silhouetto of a god, Mechonis! Mechonis! will you do the Fandango?!

Living up to past greatness, the story of Xenoblade Chronicles:

An early concern of mine with the game came from interviews with the developers, in which they spoke of the story as being simplified. As a huge fan of the developer’s story heavy games, this concerned me. If you have the same concerns as I did, let me put them to rest. While the game does indeed start off with a simple story of revenge, it eventually begins to bloat into so much more. The morality of gods, existentialism, the fatalism of pre-cognition, and a long mythos that goes back to creation, these are the building blocks of Xenoblade Chronicles’ story. While originally titled “Monado”, it is most certainly a Xeno game through and through. Outside of the main narrative, you get to develop the bonds between your 7 party members, which can affect your stats in an affinity system that expands to the vast cast of named NPCs as well. These NPCs all have connections to each other that you can forge and/or develop as you complete quests and share conversation. Through the course of the game, you will begin to know more than you probably should about every resident in the game’s world. Because of this, everything that happens to the world of the game and to the characters upon it, hold a great weight on your emotional connection to the story.

An influence from MMORPGs, the battles system of Xenoblade Chronicles:

The battle system in Xenoblade Chronicles will be familiar to MMO RPG veterans, but has some fun JRPG elements to liven it up. Combat in the game uses a customizable “arts” bar, for each character you choose 8 arts from the ones they learn throughout your adventure, and assign them to their bar. In the center of each arts bar is your character’s “talent” which cannot be changed, these tend to be the best attacks or abilities in the game. As you attack or heal, you gain agro which draws the attention of foes towards you. Some characters specialize in building agro and taking the brunt of the damage, while others attack from a distance, or deal out status effects by attacking from the side or from behind. Certain attacks will build up your talent gauge which normally builds much slower than other arts. While managing the arts you use, your characters will auto attack the enemies they are locked on to. Occasionally a “burst affinity” will trigger, which requires you to precisely time a button press to succeed. If you are successful you will raise your characters’ “tension” (which will boosts your stats) and, if so equipped, put other bonuses into effect. There is also a “party” gauge, which is made of 3 bars, 1 full bar can allow you to revive a fallen comrade, while 3 full bars can allow you to initiate a “chain”. A chain allows you to essentially freeze time and initiate arts for each of your party’s members. Sometimes at the end of a chain you are given a burst affinity, if you successfully time it you can get in another attack, at which point you might be offered another burst affinity, and so on, and so on. Often times in order to get an advantage on your foes you must combo status effects. Typically the order goes break, then topple, then daze. Some enemies in the game cannot take damage unless they have been toppled and some cannot be toppled properly unless you do so through a chain. So the arts you use, and the order in which you use them are strategically important. Initially I found the combat system to be overwhelming; I just kind of sat there and let my characters do the work as I looked on baffled. Thankfully, the developers knew this would be an issue, so the first enemies you take on don’t deal out any crazy status effects, and are easily dispatched, giving you time to acclimate. Tens of hours into the game it was still introducing status effects, the last of which is probably “spike” damage. Spike is a tricky sort of defensive damage dealing that changes entire strategies, turning the secret of your success into the recipe of your doom. That an initially overwhelming battle system is having such radically game altering effects come into play so late into the game speaks well of the game’s density and depth.

Micromanagement plays a big part in Xenoblade Chronicles, it is deep and expansive. I have often spent hours at a time re-organizing armor, weapons, gems, arts, and skills for my seven characters. The game has a materia-esque system by which you can equip up to three gems on some weapons, and one gem per piece of certain armors, these gems can boost stats like HP, strength, and defense, or even add elemental damage to your auto attacks. You can craft gems from ether crystals mined throughout the game’s world, and from the remains of fallen foes. Gem crafting can also be somewhat strategic as you find ways to raise the level of your crystals without turning them into gems. By doing this, you can then craft using higher level crystals, and potentially push your newly crafted gem to a level beyond the crystals you used. Each character has 3 personality traits, as you prioritize 1 over the others the personality traits act as skill trees, each skill you unlock under a trait will grant improvements such as more HP, or critical attacks deal more damage. You can unlock 2 additional traits per character. Based on the level of affinity between characters you can even assign skills of 1 character onto another. There is allot of strategy in how this is done, and clever use of borrowed skills can radically change the way you use characters. There is so much to micromanage; it would be entirely overwhelming if it wasn’t so much fun.

Modernizing the JRPG, the polish of Xenoblade Chronicles:

One of the greatest strengths of Xenoblade Chronicles, and one you will read allot about in reviews, is the modernization of the JRPG format. The game takes problem areas of the genre, and polishes them up, smoothing out most of the kinks. Fast Travel is in, and landmark destinations are everywhere. Save spots are gone, you can save anywhere in Xenoblade Chronicles. When you die, it drops you off at the last landmark with no penalty. Simple quests like ones where you are asked to “kill X many of Y” are fulfilled upon completion of task rather than returning to the quest giver. Many quests DO require you to return to the quest giver, but those quests have stories that need to be told upon completion. There are no healing items, or magic points, you recover between battles, and abilities use cool-down times between uses. There are no random battles, and fights take place without a transition. If you are a higher level than the foes on the battlefield, most of them will ignore you unless you chose to pick a fight yourself. You also gain experience from quests, and exploration instead of just combat. While these, often MMO inspired, modernizations are welcome, there are still a few archaic elements that now feel even more out of place due to the modernizations they sit next to. For Example, it would have been nice to use the story quest GPS-like marker as a way of finding NPCs in some of the harder to navigate towns. Returning to a quest giver in Frontier Village can be a real pain in the ass, if you don’t remember where a character hangs out, and when they do. I would also have been happy if you could adjust the size of the map as some tight corridors with POI (Point Of Interest, a GPS term) icons, such as the Ether Cave can be annoying to navigate. The ability to turn these POI icons on and off would have also been welcome, as would the ability to place markers on the map yourself, as you can in many modern sandbox games. Another thing I missed was a unified menu, while I did like the means of entering the menu system in Xenoblade it would have been nice to stay within it as you go from one menu to another, instead of exiting out of the menu system and re-entering it. In the end, however, these complaints only stand out in the face of the many refinements already made. I look forward to further refinements on MonolithSoft’s upcoming Wii-U title.

On the surface, Xenoblade Chronicles is not a showcase of graphical prowess. Textures are often blurry, geometry is blocky, the water is flat, and sprite effects cheaply mask the visual limitations. That being said, it is a thoroughly gorgeous game. What it lacks in texture resolution and geometry it makes up for in scale and imaginative world design. Seeing pictures or videos of Xenoblade Chronicles doesn’t do it justice, actually traversing from 1 place to another and looking back upon the path you took can be a mind-blowing experience. That the game rewards you for finding the vantage points that best display this, can have unintended benefits as well. While playing, I trudged up a path through a swamp and found my way into a cave, upon entering the cave I was greeted with a glowing spring of water. As it was a landmark, I gained experience. One of my party members happened to level up at that exact moment, cueing an audible gasp that reflected my own astonishment at the view. Xenoblade Chronicles is the marriage of large open world environments and exceedingly pretty art direction. It might not impress in a screenshot or video, but as you play, you will occasionally have to remember to lift your jaw from the floor.

stunning

Aural sex, the Audio of Xenoblade Chronicles:

The audio in Xenoblade is a thing of beauty, filled with Zelda-esque memorable chimes, 2 excellent language tracks, and some of the best music a game has ever had. Every area of the game has daytime and nighttime themes, as well as various battle themes depending on the level or rarity of your foe. The tracks that really grabbed my attention, however, were linked to the narrative of the game. Often repeated in key cut-scenes, two themes in particular will stay with me forever, the somber yet hopeful “While I Think…”, and the excitement educing “Engage the Enemy”. I am also quite fond of the music-box inspired “Reminiscence”, which should make fans of the Xenogears OST track “Distant Promise” smile. You could pick just about any track from the soundtrack at random and end up listening to something profound. I would say it is, perhaps, the best all around video game soundtrack I have ever heard. There is not a bad track to be had.

Final Thoughts:

240 hours, that is the amount of time I invested into this game. It was time well spent. It tasked me to explore a massive, astonishingly unique, and cleverly designed world. It involved me in a beautifully convoluted story, which took me through the creation of the world itself. It entangled me in the lives of nearly 200 named residents with interconnecting stories. While it is not a perfect game, no game is, and yet Xenoblade Chronicles comes damned close. If you own a Wii, make sure not to miss its greatest game.